Last
week I came across project risk, and not for the first time! So, time to spend
some words on this topic.

Especially
organizations in Energy&Utilities and Manufacturing have huge risks in
their assets and in their projects. You think you have all risks identified
through the standard risk identification process and you just missed that
elephant?! This might impact your yearly financial result or worse!

This
is why more and more clients start to look at Project Risk methodologies. My
client happened to use the PMBOK methodology. In this methodology you consider
standard project phases including standard risks and controls. This is great,
since you have most of the standard risks covered. But what about that risk
that is just not standard? This is where gate reviews will help you. These gate
reviews are held after every project phase. Each gate review contains questions
used to identify risks, holds monitoring methodologies to check status and
behavior and contains audit like activities. Key element here is that all
findings roll up to top level so no significant risk can be missed.

This
all works for what we call manageable risks, but what about risks that you
cannot manage? How will you anticipate on this? Well these risks can be covered
by sensitivity analysis, simulations and business continuity management.
Especially sensitivity analysis and business continuity analysis will help you.
For simulations you will need data, and a significant amount of data. Only in
case you have many similar projects running in a regular cycle you will be able
to generate enough risk identifications and losses to be able to make a sensible
calculation like Monte Carlo simulations.

Now
the system is in place, and now we are in control? Wrong! This is where the
real work starts. How do I get my organization to adopt risk in her daily
business? How do I get input with the right quality? How do I make everyone a
risk manager? This takes time and effort. Guide your people in how to make the
assessments and make them part of it. Give them back where they contributed to,
and make their life easier. That is what we call Smarter Risk.

IBM
OpenPages and Deloitte have put together a Risk Methodology for project risk
where all these technologic and organizational aspects come together and can be
integrated in your enterprise risk platform.

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